This author’s work

Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur ?
Gisèle Sapiro
Seuil, 2020

It is noteworthy, sociologically at least, that we tie the author so closely to what she produces. In contrast to members of other occupations, like those in medicine or the law, the author’s words seem to originate in herself, compelled by no formal institution. It is obvious to us that the doctor acts in the name of a corporate body (“medicine”), giving advice whose value derives from its collective authority rather than its singularity. It is likewise obvious to us that the certified lawyer acts in the name of a formal institution (“the legal profession”). We might cast occasional suspicion toward defence lawyers, concerned that they personally side with an accused despite heinous accusations, but we don’t assume arguments presented in the courtroom are simply the expression of their personal convictions. In contrast to such workers, the author seems to manifest herself in her product, a fact confirmed by the proper name she attaches to claim the work. It follows from this, we feel, that she bears moral responsibility for this product.

Our association of author and work is so thorough that we wonder whether we can separate the two. In her recent book addressing that very question, Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur ?, Gisèle Sapiro approaches the increasingly fraught space this question occupies, bringing sociological, philosophical, and historical knowledge to an area otherwise littered with polemic and partial truths (and where accusations of “cancel culture” are hurled and repelled). With this approach, Sapiro is interested in elucidating the conditions under which such a question can be asked, offering observers and participants alike some sense of what is at stake in the debates that take place here, where authors and their works suffer or bask in the light of public opinion. She declares it important “to try to clarify the stakes of an often confused debate, where the pamphleteering style, which privileges conflation and bad faith to disqualify an opponent, often takes over rational argumentation” (p.10).

Above all, the debates Sapiro focuses on derive from instances in which authors act in morally reprehensible ways or from works that are deemed in some way immoral. The consequent moral questions we deem necessary are that of what responsibility the author bears for the immoral work and whether that work should continue to be consumed in the light of immoral actions. Yet what these routine questions conceal in plain sight is our tendency to readily identify the author and the work. Sapiro notes that while we tend to identify the two, treating the work as the product of an “an individual expressing herself with her own proper name” (p.11), the relationship is actually highly contingent. Her book is an attempt both to understand the social and historical determinants of author-work identification and to observe how this contingent relationship plays out in significant literary controversies.

The first part of the book sketches a constellation of different ways that authors and their works are alternatively identified and dissociated. The second part of the book approaches the recent literary controversies mentioned above and examines them through the framework set out in the first part. As this is an intervention into a morally-charged area, a normative question hangs over it. This is the question of what to do with the works of those who are guilty of reprehensible acts. Sapiro provides numerous rich analyses of specific cases, but as we will see, she does not hesitate to present a uniform normative position for the justification of censorship.

Our debates that take authors and ask about their relation to “their” work usually take these two units for granted. The close relation between them is, however, a relatively recent creation, owing in large part to the acquisition of intellectual property rights by the author after the seventeenth century (p.47). The fact that the work belongs to the author, then, is maintained by an institutional structure identifying them with their product (entailing the accrual of economic and symbolic benefits as well as penalties upon transgression). Fixing all of this is the proper name, of undeniable importance in literature, where pen-names are hardly shocking to see. Writers can attempt to avoid sanction by adopting pen names (a strategy that only makes sense in a world that assumes the author and their work are closely identified). In the first part of the book, Sapiro identifies three axes along which author and work are linked. In these various ways, we see how authors come to be alternately identified and differentiated from their works.

Along the first axis, the relationship between the author and his work manifests itself in metonymy, where the author’s name is so closely associated with his works that they can be taken to stand in for him (p.29). This association gives coherence to the body of work. But the coherence isn’t final, since the body of work shows itself to be malleable, changing in response to the author’s decisions (not to publish or republish) or to publisher’s interests (“unpublished manuscript discovered”). These shifting wishes are often occasioned by conditions in the relevant “field”. So, as Sapiro (p.30) writes, Louis-Ferdinand Céline opted to restrict his body of work by refusing after WWII to republish his earlier antisemitic pamphlets. However, in light of transformations in the field long after his death, they would come to be collected and republished (at least in Canada––the initiative was abandoned in France [p.43]). In the end, the metonymic identification between author and work is a contingent relationship that has to be maintained with the assistance or complicity of publishers, reviewers, and readers.

The second relationship between author and work that Sapiro stipulates is that of resemblance, where it assumed that the author exists to some extent in their works, which are an “emanation of the person of the author” (p.50). Evident moral positions – whether voiced by a protagonist or deemed to be the underlying “thesis” of the work – are presumed to be shared by the author. This one is starkly modern, for works prior to the eighteenth century were not securely possessed by those we would now consider their makers. Rather, royals granted publishers copyright “privileges” to works that did not even belong to the publishers. With this shift in conceptions of property, there followed novel aesthetic criteria: originality, authenticity, specificity of style––all deemed to be manifestations of internal “talent”. Literary controversies demonstrate yet again how the line between author and work is a stake in a struggle rather than a given. Literary trials, for instance, force certain authors to dissociate themselves from their works and the characters therein (p.54). These controversies bring to light the complex relation between work and author in various other cultural forms: ranging from intimate journal (clear identification) to autofiction (swinging between identification and distanciation) in literature, to clearly fictional accounts in film and to accounts that are ambiguous, as in sexist song lyrics disavowed by those who write and perform them (p.84). In any case, Sapiro suggests that there are sociological conditions underlying the proximity between work and author here. For instance, the more autonomous the cultural form, the more likely it is that the author can dissimulate herself (p.68). In certain strands of twentieth-century poetry, for example, it is hard to trace back the “meaning” of a phrase to a feeling internal to the poet. Nevertheless, as Sapiro shows, continuing Bourdieu’s explanation of Heidegger’s conservative philosophy, this does not prevent “ethico-political dispositions” from leaking through in sublimated ways that obey the norms of the more autonomous field.

The third relationship treats works as the product of the author’s internal will and intention, with the author bearing responsibility for the words produced. Once again, in literary trials we see how this seemingly simple identification between author and work can be made unstable. Sapiro notes that while judges attend to the intentions of the author, it is not merely to attribute blame, but to inspect whether there was intention to harm. In the absence of this intention, they locate the harm in the work itself, the means “erroneously” chosen by the author to realize some other intention. Thus intention remains on the side of the author, while the consequence appears on the side of the work, permitting the author to escape punishment for transgressive writing.

Along these axes, then, instability always haunts the settled pairing: the author can be metamorphosed and adopt new names, the body of work can shift its boundaries in response to the demands of the field, and the relation between them is subject to all kinds of strategising. What appeared earlier as a given – the tight association between author and work – becomes extremely hard to pin down: “Although profoundly anchored in the…foundational belief of fields of cultural production since the Romantic movement, the identification between the work and the author is therefore never complete” (p.84).

The second half of the book treats specific cases of author-work relationships, with variable deployment of the theoretical structure applied above. Ultimately, what we see are various forms of public struggles over this contingent relationship between author and work. With Roman Polanski, for instance (somebody who does not direct films under a pseudonym), defenders are eager to separate his work from his personal acts, insisting on the contingency of the relation. His detractors, on the other hand, note that the same “Polanski” who directed J’accuse is the one who raped a teenage girl (p.101). With Sapiro’s identification of the dimensions and potential forms this relationship can take, we gain a clearer understanding of the grammar of these public struggles. Her framework does recede at times, however, and this is not necessarily for the worse. With the case of Gabriel Matzneff, for example, Sapiro probes deeper into the specific case, taking issue with the popular claim that it was due to a post-68 libertinism that Matzneff was treated with impunity regarding his pedophilic acts (which were integrated into his works). Instead, he escaped punishment due to the social networks in which he was enmeshed (p.118). Ultimately, what Polanski and Matzneff hold in common is the “impunity of dominant males abusing their position and authority – or the ‘charisma’ of the director or writer – to satisfy their pathological impulses, with the complicity of the field of power” (p.128).

The book proceeds to examine those who have expressed, through act or cultural work, disdainful attitudes towards ethnic minorities. These figures are notable for the political diversity among them and for their changing attitudes and actions. For instance, what is one to make of a figure like Günter Grass, who revealed late in life that he had been a Waffen-SS member over six decades earlier, but whose public political positions, stated while he was a published author, seemed to militate against this? With the assumption of a coherent identity on the part of the author, and a secure link to the work, we assume continuity between personal opinion, public pronouncements, and artistic work. But, as in the case of Grass, or with Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man, and others, there appears to be a dissonance that remains difficult for their defenders to reconcile (p.135). As for those for whom there is little dissonance – Martin Heidegger, Céline, Charles Maurras – but in whom defenders seek to create some, strategies abound. From defending Heidegger’s antisemitism as a “contamination” and a wayward “error”, to defending the inclusion of Maurras in a book of national commemorations as necessary merely for scholarly reasons, interested parties have sought to sever the author from the work. Or, in an alternative interpretation of Sapiro’s argument, those with a professional interest in Heidegger or Maurras need to preserve their persons – rather than the work alone – as worthy of study. Yet, as Sapiro notes, scholars with an interest in despicable characters risk lending their credibility and rehabilitating them. Sapiro concludes with a discussion of the likes of Renaud Camus and Richard Millet, who seem to arrive at xenophobic beliefs in later life. She sees this partly as a strategy on their part to forestall the loss of more symbolic capital. But more importantly, paying attention to how they express themselves, Sapiro detects in them a properly aesthetic disposition that they use to conceal or sublimate a brute racism, which predated any career decline. Thus, Millet, for instance, fetishizes a purified literary style, claiming to find in the horrors of Anders Breivik’s massacre a “formal perfection”. In evidence here is a deployment of aesthetic autonomy (“art for art’s sake”) to carry out heteronomous and specifically political speech acts.

Sapiro’s concluding normative position attempts to strike a balance, refusing to resolve the irresolvable: aesthetic works, she claims, are entitled to be judged according to aesthetic criteria. Since the “fields” of cultural production have developed specific norms and barriers to entry, it would be, in Bourdieu’s use of the term, “tyrannical” to impose external principles. However, this tyranny appears justified in special instances: when the works incite hatred towards people for certain “ascribed” features (ethnic or gender identity, sexual orientation [p.18]) or, in light of Matzneff and Polanski, when the works affirms pedophilia or defend rape (p.232).

Vanessa Springora, who recently brought unavoidable exposure to Matzneff’s actions, succeeded by taking her experience of his grooming and predatory relationship with her teenage self, and putting it into memoir form (recently translated as Consent). Interestingly, the personal nature of the topic notwithstanding, she appeals to aesthetic criteria: “I try to remind people that this is first and foremost a piece of literature.” Her attempt to assert such literary autonomy must nevertheless overcome ingrained attitudes about the close relation between the author’s experience and its articulation in work. Some reviewers evidently found the author-work pairing too reliable to refuse, declaring of the book that whatever its deficiencies as literature, “as testimony its status is unequivocal.”